Faculty

Tara McAllister

Associate Professor

Tara McAllister is a linguist and speech-language pathologist who studies speech development in children with and without phonological delay or disorder. Her research aims to explain how children’s articulatory and perceptual limitations shape their early phonological development, and why some children's speech sound errors do not resolve over the course of maturation or in response to conventional forms of treatment. She has an active program of clinical research investigating the efficacy of intervention that uses technologies (e.g. ultrasound, acoustic analysis) to provide visual biofeedback for persistent speech sound errors in children. She also leads an interdisciplinary team that is developing an app (staRt, "Speech Therapist's App for /r/ Treatment") to make visual-acoustic biofeedback widely available to practicing speech-language pathologists.

McAllister has published in journals such as Phonology, the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, the Journal of Communication Disorders, and the Journal of Child Language. Her research on technologically advanced interventions for speech sound disorders is supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R03DC012883; R01DC013668). McAllister earned an A.B./A.M. in linguistics from Harvard University, an M.S. in communication disorders from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT.